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Insectissimo is the third in our Paw Prints series. Once again it is written by Holly Skeet. The pictures by Chris Brown have been printed direct from his lino blocks.
We’ve put it in our ebay shop listed as a children’s book. It wasn’t easy to decide on a category, as we think it will be loved by people of all ages. A friend lent her copy of Circus Minimus, its predecessor, to her grown up daughter, who didn’t want to give it back.
Mark Twain is a bit of a hero around here. He’s best known as a writer, of course, and a great one. We really like his description of his time as a cub pilot on a Mississippi steamboat.
Less well known is that one of his first jobs was as a compositor. He found it such drudgery that he later invested a lot of money in a type setting machine. Sadly for him his investment wasn’t a good one.
He was also a wit, of course, and when we found this quote we couldn’t resist it.
As usual, you can find this in our ebay shop.
Tutti Frutti is back! We were thrilled with the response to the original print and both pleased and sorry that it sold out. Sorry because it was a limited edition, so nobody else could get it. We obviously couldn’t do a straight reprint, but we could do a new version, and that’s what we’ve done. The layout is changed, and Rosa chose a stunning new set of vibrant colours. What’s more, we haven’t signed or numbered them, so we’ve brought the price down.
Tutti Frutti is in our ebay store and at Ben Pentreath now, and Keep Calm will have it next week.
We’ve always preferred the idea of god being in the details to the alternate version, where it’s the devil. We try to pay attention to the details in our work, which is why we chose to make this poster.
Once we had decided to use metallic inks on black paper we knew we had to under-print them to bring out their brilliance. There is opaque white under the silver and yellow under the gold. We used Fabriano Ingres 160 gsm paper, trimmed on two edges to 700 x 500 mm.
Like most of our other posters, you can find it in our shop.
This may be churlish, but there is one aspect of the current revival of interest in letterpress that bothers us. Impression. Or rather, excessive impression.
Often now our customers want their printing heavily pressed into the page. We can understand it: they’re usually paying a premium to use us, and they can reasonably expect to get something extra. Such is the demand that Crane’s have produced their Lettra range of uncalendered papers. Soft and textured, they take impression very nicely and are, as the lager ads used to say, reassuringly expensive.
A couple of months ago we printed business cards for someone who said they weren’t ‘letterpressed properly’ because we hadn’t produced a braille-like surface. There seems to be such an expectation now of unsubtle printing that we’re often unsure how a new customer is going to receive our work.
We always do our best to oblige when asked to thump the paper. It involves us balancing the customer’s instruction with producing a sharp, clean image. Pushing extra hard on the plate (we never do this to our type) can produce distortion, especially at corners.
We explained to our dissatisfied client that printing you can feel as well as see is a recent fashion. We have read that the history of letterpress in the industrial age can be seen as the story of the elimination of impression. If a machine minder of, say, the 1960s saw work like that in our photograph you could expect the air to turn blue.
What, you might ask, is the point of letterpress without impression? As another customer said recently, we deliver blacker blacks and denser colours than litho. When we work with metal and wood rather than plates you get the qualities, good and bad, of the design of the type and the physical limitations of putting it together.
If you ask us to print something that shows through on the other side we’ll do it the best we can. We like the traditions of our trade, though. We talk about cases and galleys, not drawers and trays. When we’re left to our own devices we like our type to kiss the paper just the way our machines were made to do it.
The current edition of Ultrabold, the journal of the Friends of St Bride, includes an article Phil wrote based on his talk at Letterpress, A Celebration last November. We’ve put the text online here, but we’d like you to get the real thing if you haven’t already. That way you help to support the library and get the photographs in a larger size and higher resolution.
We will once again be at the Whittington Summer Show this year. It takes place on 5 September, and you can see the gorgeous poster here. The illustrations were hand stenciled by Miriam Macgregor, and we think it’s worth going just for the chance of picking one up.
As last year, we’ll be on the proofing press. We are currently putting together some type for a poster which we’ll be taking with us so that those who want to can print their own copy. We’ll have other posters too, as well as books and cards.
There’s a lot going on here at the moment, hence the infrequent blog entries.
Phil has been frantically printing Richard III, the latest in the the Letterpress Shakespeare series for the Folio Society. His attempts to meet the production deadline haven’t been helped by an ink problem. We used to buy a black from Shackell Edwards that was made to our specification. It was wonderfully stiff and dense, and gave a terrific sharp, rich result. SE went out of business earlier in the year, and when we asked another manufacturer, who will remain nameless, to provide a match what they came up with was so thin and runny that we’ve had to reprint five formes.
Our usual practice on the Shakespeare is that Nick imposes the formes and Phil prints them. The impositions don’t take nearly as long as the printing, and in between times Nick has been working with Rosa on the proofing press. They are printing a short extract from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for the Oak Tree Fine Press. It is only 48 pages, but they are all in two colours and there are ten or eleven wood engravings to print from the original blocks too. The type was set on a Mac and made into line blocks, which need careful positioning on the press. To add to the fun, some of the edition is on hand made paper which has very irregular edges, a nightmare for maintaining register.
The job has had its problems and it’s going much slower than we had hoped, but the printing’s looking great.
Letters Are Letters was one of our first poster, and it has sold very well at Ben Pentreath’s shop. So well, in fact, that it we have reprinted it. The first time round it was in black and red, so we made the second colour green this time.
The text is a quote from Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography, and it’s something that is central to the way we design things.
Letters Are Letters is available now in our store.
A new poster. This quote from Eric Gill’s ‘An Essay on Typography’ has long appealed to us. It was a natural to use our Gill Sans wood letter for it. We printed it on Somerset Book Soft White 105 gsm paper, an acid-free mould-made. Soft is a description of the white but it might also refer to its silky feel. We have kept its two deckle edges and torn a third one.
It’s available now from our shop for £50 plus p&p.
